Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)

The Salem witch trials are one of the most fascinating events in American history. Despite being commonly covered in school curricula, the nature of the trials are often misunderstood. This book enables readers to get unique perspective and insight into the nature of this event through a representative selection of primary source materials, each of which is prefaced with explanatory editorial comments. The result is a work that clarifies the belief systems and religious and social culture of 17th century Massachusetts and places them into a comprehensible context to make sense of how the...

Progressivism, James Connolly shows us, was a language and style of political action available to a wide range of individuals and groups. A diverse array of political and civic figures used it to present themselves as leaders of a communal response to the growing power of illicit interests and to the problems of urban-industrial life. As structural reforms weakened a ward-based party system that helped mute ethnic conflict, this new formula for political mobilization grew more powerful. Its most effective variation in Boston was an "ethnic progressivism" that depicted the city's public...

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many early Americans believed that human activity and population growth were essential to moderating the harsh extremes of cold and heat in the New World. In the preindustrial British settler colonies in...

Whereas my husband, Enoch Darling, has at sundry times used me in so improper and cruel a manner, as to destroy my happiness and endanger my life, and whereas he has not provided for me as a husband ought, but expended his time and money unadvisedly, at taverns . . . . I hereby notify the public that I am obliged to leave him.
Phebe Darling, January 13, 1796

Hundreds of provocative notices such as this one ran in New England newspapers between 1790 and 1830. These elopement notices--advertisements paid for by husbands and occasionally wives to announce their spouses'...